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Category Archives: Business

Nowadays, corporate life is no longer as simple as it was before. First, we had a boss, who had employees. The boss told the employees what their tasks were, and they executed the work – a simple, straightforward approach. But now things have changed; the importance of employee motivation has finally been recognized, and team members are expected to work closely together. As a result, managers were convinced to be leaders, and not bosses anymore.

The boss turned out to be the evil villain of the story. Nobody wants to have a boss or – for god’s sake! – to become one. Being a leader is great; you work with people who deeply respect you, you feel good about yourself, you are some kind of superhero. But, is being a leader good for your career?

Work experience is usually measured in years. If time is a valid measurement of work experience, then it is logical to conclude that two employees working for the same period of time in the same profession (and for the sake of simplicity at the same company and department) will have similar work experiences. Is this a reasonable assumption?

The answer is clearly no.

The assumption, work experience can be measured in years is closely related to the belief that learning is a reaction to the environment, where the environment shapes the human behavior. This environmentalist point of view emphasizes the environment as a trigger of learning processes and underestimates intra-individual differences in interests, motivation and personality. Continue reading →

Almost every article about entrepreneurship will at some point repeat the mantra “find a problem and offer a solution for it”. Problem-solution, problem-solution, it is really easy to remember it. However, no matter how simple the concept sounds, many tech companies don’t get it right.

The Reason? People with tech background have such a passion for new developments that they focus more on the technology than on the solution. Many tech companies are born with the cart before the horses: they first concentrate their attention to their know-how and later they see what they could do with it. The result: they have an amazing product, using an incredible technology, with award winning complex algorithms, which nobody wants.Continue reading →

The advantages of recruiting new employees are praised over and over again and have become a commonplace in Management. Recruiting external professionals shall increase the team’s diversity and stimulate changes and innovation. However, do organizations really profit from the ideas new employees bring into the company?

Unfortunately not. Several organizations are not able to benefit from the vast knowledge which new employees bring along. We all agree: as time goes by, groups and departments become a victim of groupthink, which results in a loss of creativity and biased decision making processes. However, is a new hire really able to influence this process? Continue reading →

Before we start: this text is not about encouraging companies to go ahead firing whoever they want as it would be no big thing. To lose a job is a serious setback and the decision to dismiss someone must be taken carefully. However, as companies sometimes fire staff members for the wrong reasons, sometimes they keep employees for erroneous reasons as well. This is what this text is about.

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Probably every company knows the situation: you hired someone convinced that the person was the right choice. But he wasn’t. Maybe it was only a month ago and you have already realized that it is not going to work. However, even if you are not convinced about your employee’s performance, you do not want to dismiss him, because: Continue reading →

Scrum – an agile software development framework – has become so popular in the software industry as flared pants in the hippie scene. Which is great, of course. However, what is not so great is how some people are getting fanatic about it.

Sometimes one can get the impression that Scrum wasn’t developed by normal people like you and me, but inscribed by God on two stone tablets and given to Moses in a rainy day. Scrum should be a tool and not a religion. Instead of getting fanatic about Scrum, embrace it, use it and change it according to your needs. Continue reading →

Annual Staff Meeting: The CEO hopes to encourage employee participation; the topics have been carefully chosen to stimulate communication exchange. However, nobody seems to care; the engineering is concentrated on the challenge of not falling asleep, the marketing is playing business bingo. When the meeting finally approaches the end, HR comes up with the slide about the low employee turnover rate. “We are doing a great job; our employees are high committed with our company” was the obvious conclusion.

A low voluntary turnover is not necessarily a positive development. A high turnover rate does not sound promising; that is true, and it is hard to justify a high fluctuation without concluding that the train ran off the rails. But if everybody is staying, it does not automatically means that it is favorable for your company.Continue reading →

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"Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?" --J. Paul Getty

About the Author:

Vanessa del Valle Magalhães is the woman behind Insanity Corp, a passionate non-conformist with a background in Engineering and Psychology. She has more than 10 years experience working with companies of different profiles, varying from small
business to multinational corporations in Brazil and Germany.